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Historically, English used to have a similar verbal paradigm. Some historic verb forms are used by Shakespeare as slightly archaic or more formal variants (I do, thou dost, he doth) of the modern forms. Some languages with verbal agreement can leave certain subjects implicit when the subject is fully determined by the verb form.
The verbs do, say and have additionally have irregular third person singular present tense forms (see below). The copular verb be is highly irregular, with the forms be, am, is, are, was, were, been and being. On the other hand, modal verbs (such as can and must) are defective verbs, being used only in a limited number of forms.
The first English grammar, Bref Grammar for English by William Bullokar, published in 1586, does not use the term "auxiliary" but says: All other verbs are called verbs-neuters-un-perfect because they require the infinitive mood of another verb to express their signification of meaning perfectly: and be these, may, can, might or mought, could, would, should, must, ought, and sometimes, will ...
The verb be has a larger number of different forms (am, is, are, was, were, etc.), while the modal verbs have a more limited number of forms. Some forms of be and of certain other auxiliary verbs also have contracted forms (' s, 're, 've, etc.). For full details of how these inflected forms of verbs are produced, see English verbs.
The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality, properties such as possibility and obligation. [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
Regular verbs have identical past tense and past participle forms in -ed, but there are 100 or so irregular English verbs with different forms (see list). The verbs have, do and say also have irregular third-person present tense forms (has, does /dʌz/, says /sɛz/).
ki’ere NEG. PST vau 1. SG i PFV haere go i PREP te ART fare house ki’ere vau i haere i te fare NEG.PST 1.SG PFV go PREP ART house 'I did not go to a house.' Non-past negative (Regular negative) kāre kāre NEG. NPST tā-koe ART - 2SG puta book kāre tā-koe puta NEG.NPST ART-2SG book 'You don't have your book.' (Lit. 'Your book doesn't exist') Hawaiian The Hawaiian language conveys aspect ...
In Modern English, this type of modality is expressed via a periphrastic construction, with the form would + infinitive, (for example, I would buy), and thus is a mood only in the broad sense and not in the more common narrow sense of the term "mood" requiring morphological changes in the verb. In other languages, verbs have a specific ...